The internet is flooded with articles on validating your product or startup ideas. They have details of creating surveys, MVPs, interviews and filled with business and marketing jargon? The process of validating a product idea appears so complicated that sometimes building a validation process is a task in itself.
After almost 17 years of working with startups and online products and businesses, we realized that getting a quick validation for your idea need not be so complicated.
You can get a quick initial validation in as less as 72 hours by following the following repeatable simple steps.
The core purpose of all validation activities is to let your users interact with your idea and proposed solution and then listen to what they have to say.
Here are the steps that we have successfully used to get a quick confirmation of our assumptions:
tldr; The steps in a nutshell
- Split your user on-boarding process into 2 to 3 steps
- Create one landing page for each step. Each page must have a form associated with your user on-boarding step and an associated drip email campaign
- Create 3 goals in google analytics to understand at what step users quit and (perhaps) why
- Send traffic to your first landing page i.e. the first user on-boarding step. Usually at this step you ask only for Name and Email Address
- Watch the source of traffic and how they move from one step to another
- Start talking with your early adopters and listen to what they have to say.
The steps in detail
Here is how we used these steps to validate the product idea of the makers of Kiddy Mailbox.
Assumption to validate: Children love to receive letters (physical letters, not emails) from Santa and their favorite super heroes. And if their hero asks them to do something, they listen and act. If your son loves Batman and Batman asks him to brush his teeth before bed, in a personal letter, your son listens. The idea was to help the parents get the help of super heroes to manage the behaviour issues of kids.
This sounded like a great idea but we needed some proof to confirm it.
It was Christmas, so we decided to signup some parents, get to know about the kids and send them an email from Santa.
We used the free Online Marketing Automation System at OnlineMarketingWizard.com but you can use any service that you like.
Step 1: Split your user on-boarding process into 2-3 steps
The first step to have a clear idea of what your product is supposed to work. You know what you need from your users to make the product useful for them. We want to focus mostly on the on-boarding process of your users i.e. the first few steps that your users must take in your product.
In this step, we plan to break this on-boarding into two or three steps. This is the only thing we want to test.
For Kiddy Mailbox, we knew we needed information about the parents and their children. Specially the behaviour issues faced by them.
So we created 3 steps for sign-up
- Parents signup with name and email
Super simple, minimum barrier to entry and we have something to contact these users for follow up if needed. - Details of child and self
This was a longer form with lots of fields related to children’s information, address to post the letter, etc. - Thank you page with a survey form
This was the final step where we ask generic questions about this service, what they would like to see, their concerns, their suggestions etc
Step 2: Create one landing page for each step.
So we created three landing pages, one for each page. Each page had a form associated with the user on-boarding step and an associated drip email campaign.
The drip emails are important because a lot of people quit in the middle of these steps. We need to gently remind them to get back and what they are missing if they do not signup (or what they will gain if they sign up, depending on how you are positioning your product).
We created the following three landing pages
Page 1: The welcome page
Content: This had the sales pitch (similar to the final product).
Form: Simple signup form for Name and Email.
Email Campaign: 3 Emails, one email sent everyday where we introduce the users to why they should fill up step 2. These emails stop if the user signs up for step 2.
Page 2: Parent and child details
Content: Overview of why we need the information and how we plan to use it (Privacy is a big concern here and we wanted to address that at the start).
Form: Details of Child and Parents
Email Campaign: 3 Emails, one email sent everyday where we thank the parent for giving us the details and what they should expect next. Also ask them to fill up the survey on next step.
This stops if the parents sign up for step 3.
Page 3: Thank you page with survey
Content: Thank the parents for signing up and request them to give some information to make our service better.
Form: A small set of questions related to our assumptions
Email Campaign: A thank you email and the instructions on what to expect next.
Usually you will need a bunch of different services to build this kind of a funnel. You would need a service to create landing pages, a service to send emails, service to create survey forms and so on. Online Marketing Wizard was our platform of choice because we could do all this and more from their simple to use interface.
Step 3: Create goals in google analytics.
Now you need something to help you understand the details of the visitors coming to your site… you would need to know stuff like
- From where are the users coming
- At what step users quit and (perhaps) why
- Is there any co-relation between the source of users and their behaviour on site
Our tool of choice for this was the free service of Google Analytics. We created a new property and created three goals, one for each step.
In Online Marketing Wizard, you have to go to the settings screen and paste the Google Analytics code. It gets applied to all landing pages.
Step 4: Send traffic to your first landing page
Now you want to start sending traffic to the first step of your on-boarding process i.e. the first landing page. You want to ask for the minimum information here (usually something as simple as only the name and email address).
Since we did not have any existing channels to promote this site (like Facebook pages/groups or twitter etc) we decided to use Facebook Ads for this. The target audience was available on Facebook. We could use the fine grained targeting features of Facebook Ads to target very specific users.
Facebook also has an awesome feature of using Facebook Pixels where it can track the effectiveness of its ads and optimize the delivery of the ads. Effectively, it tries to understand which kind of people signup on the destination page of my website and then tries to find more of those kinds people. This is very effective. We saw a very significant improvement in conversion ratio and cost per click of our ads.
You can also leverage your social media, personal network and so on to send as much traffic to your site.
We set the Facebook Pixel on the thank you page of first step using the Facebook Pixel feature in landing pages that we created in the Online Marketing Wizard
Step 5: Watch the traffic on your funnel
Then the waiting game started. The Dashboard of Online Marketing Wizard gave us very detailed breakup of how many visitors were coming, how many signed up at which stage.
The Google Analytics Dashboard gave us more insight about the visitors and what they were doing.
We let this campaign run for 3 days with a total budget of $50.
At the end of the campaign we ended up with
- Signups on Page 1: 783
- Signups on Page 2: 567
- Signups on Page 3: 247
Start talking to the users who sign up
Users who fill up step 2 and step 3 are very high potential leads. They are your early adopters.
Start talking your early adopters. The idea is to discuss their pain points and your proposed solution.
Conclusion
The idea got validated. The team was very enthusiastic and started planning for the next steps. Eventually those guys scrapped the idea because of logistical reasons and conflicting advice from different Pshyco-Analysts regarding the interpretation of child’s behaviour and corrective actions.
As far as validation was concerned, it was done flawlessly and the free and simple service of Online Marketing Wizard helped us speed up the whole process.